Rating : ⭐️
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Year: 2022
Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes
Director: Anand Tiwari
Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Gajraj Rao, Rajit Kapoor, Sheeba Chaddha, Simone Singh, Ritwik Bhowmik
Kid rating: PG-15
Maja Ma is the most recent film to focus on a LGBTQ protagonist. There’s been a spate of these films and most seem to style themselves as “comedies”. Maja Ma is not among the worst of them, but it is pretty half-baked, logic-less and seems to exist in a reality unlike ours.
Pallavi Patel (Madhuri) is your ubiquitous Gujarati housewife – you know – stunning beauty, grace, exquisite dance moves and a handsome cook to boot. She’s doting on her family and fitting right in to the social structure as the perfect homemaker until beta dearest decides to fall in love with a Punjabi American girl. And his obnoxious in-laws to-be, the Hansrajs, fly to the motherland to check out the Patel family for themselves. The traditional-minded Patels appear to tick all the boxes for the Hansraj family until an ugly rumor rears its head.
The film has good intentions, but it has many flaws and a lot of stupidity. For starters, it is populated by some of the most annoying and poorly defined characters in recent film history. Bob and Pam Hansraj (Rajit Kapoor, Sheeba Chaddha) are ill-bred and snotty and give all Indian Americans a bad name. They also drip English in atrocious accents, and fawn cringily over anything they deem authentically Indian.
The Patels, except for Pallavi, are no less annoying. Pallavi’s social worker daughter Tara is a crusader for LGBTQ rights but surprisingly ignorant and uncaring of empathy or consent. Her banshee like haranguing of her mother drove me up the wall. The son Tejas is educated but apparently the education didn’t sink in, because he is all ready to “cure” his mother with some witch-doctor wala jhaad-phook.
Maja Ma is also very unrealistic. The events in the film, especially the ones that lead up to the turning point, are so contrived, I felt like I was watching some silly Indian soap-opera.
When Pallavi is outed, the entire world turns on her. She’s asked for proof of purity like some modern-day Sita, but when she takes a stand, things fall into place pretty magically. Everything is hunky-dory again, and she’s dancing the dandiya with her lady-love as the suddenly supportive family members look on affectionately. There is a story to be had somewhere here, but director Anand Tiwari has dumbed it down beyond recognition.
The premise of Maja Ma is earth-shaking. Maja Ma asks the question but does not have the wherewithal or the gumption to provide any answers. The treatment is so superficial, I’m tempted to categorize this travesty of a film under Genre: Fantasy.
Highly de-recommended.
Kidwise: Unsuitable for the young ones.
